Posts Tagged With: Lost City of Atlantis

Divers have recovered 39 ingots, which would have been used as decorations, on the sea floor near Sicily. Archaeologists believe they may have belonged to a ship lost in the sixth century.

The ingots are made of orichalcum, a brass-like cast metal the ancient Greeks believed was from the lost city of Atlantis and was used at Poseidon’s temple. The metal lumps were found in the shipwreck of a vessel that sunk 2,600 years ago, likely on its way to Sicily from either Greece or Asia Minor.

“Nothing similar has ever been found,” Sebastiano Tusa, Sicily’s superintendent of the Sea Office,told Discovery News. Previously, researchers only knew orichalcum from ancient texts and ornamental objects. The metal is mentioned in the writings of Plato from the fourth century B.C.E. — he described Atlantis as flashing “with the red light of oricalchum,” adding that its value was second only to gold.

Tusa’s team plans to excavate the entire cargo from the shipwreck, which he hopes will give archaeologists “precious information on Sicily’s most ancient economic history.”

Molten rock is pooling beneath Greece’s Santorini volcano, the site of one of the largest eruptions in the past 10,000 years. That eruption, which took place about 3,600 years ago, wiped out the Minoan civilization of the Greek islands and may have spawned the legend of the lost city of Atlantis.

In the past 1.5 years, the magma chamber beneath the volcanic island has ballooned by as much as 350 million cubic feet (20 million cubic meters), or up to 15 times the size of London’s Olympic Stadium. This giant mass of magma has caused the island to rise by as much as 5.5 inches (14 centimeters), according to a new study published yesterday (Sept. 9) in the journal Nature Geoscience.

This research follows reports earlier in the year of renewed earthquake activity beneath the volcano after it had been silent for the past 25 years. The reports have spurred concerns the volcano could erupt in the near future, but when that might happen is still unclear, researchers said in a statement.

“Before this work, we didn’t really know how the volcano behaved during the periods of time between eruptions,” David Pyle, an Oxford University researcher and study co-author, told OurAmazingPlanet. “Now, it looks as though the magma chambers beneath volcanoes like Santorini grow in spurts.”

When the volcano erupted in approximately 1620 B.C., it created tsunamis 40 feet (12 meters) tall that destroyed much of the civilization flourishing in and around the Aegean Sea. Much of the previous island of Santorini was destroyed or submerged.From the air, the resulting caldera, or volcanic crater, appears as a small cluster within the bigger collection of Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.